Summations Only

But will you start a new thread?I'm not trying to dissuade you from posting at all (god forbid) --- I'm trying to tell you that your arguments would be very welcome on another thread where the things that you want to say would be germane. I don't want to put you off posting or arguing, I just want to say that if you want to argue with me we should wrangle with one another on a thread where our dispute is the subject of the thread.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, all you have to do is explain your point of view on the "Proposed New Topics" thread. And then the moderators promote your idea for discussion. It's not really much more of a procedure than stating your point of view in any other thread.The moderators on these forums are quite easy-going, but they do like us to have a particular topic. I think they're right.

Well, I don't. That is, I do, but not on this thread. I thought I'd made that clear.---Let me make a prediction. If mindspawn is still posting here two months from now, you will ask him to become a moderator.

YES YOU DAMN WELL DO. You're living slap in the middle of one of these civilizations you say you don't know of. WTF, dude, WTF?

Well, that's easily done, 'cos it's like asking me to post summarized evidence for the lack of unicorns.Here it is: There aren't any frickin' unicorns.In the same way, the evidence against a universal bottleneck ~4000 years ago can be summarized in a single sentence: there is no evidence for a universal bottleneck ~4000 years ago.This is why creationists bang on about cheetahs, the only known species for which there was a recent bottleneck.

Well, it's not exactly rocket science, is it? You yourself, with no particular training, if shown (for example) the skull of a triceratops, could tell me with considerable accuracy what the head of a triceratops looked like, couldn't you?Now, in every single case where we know where a dinosaur artist got his inspiration from, it turns out that he got it by looking from bones. You propose that in the cases in which we don't know, we should assume that he got his inspiration by looking at live models.This is on a par with suggesting that although all the pigs we see don't have wings, we should assume that every pig that we haven't seen does have wings. You propose that a rule which is true every single time we are able to check it must nonetheless be false on those occasions when we can't check it.Why don't you just hunt down the scientific method and shoot it if you hate it so much?

You don't seem to have grasped the concept of the "burden of proof".The burden of proof always falls on someone who proposes an exception to an observed rule. If in our experience no pigs have wings, then the burden of proof falls on someone who claims that some pigs do have wings. He has to produce a winged pig or shut up.Now, what you are proposing is that every rule we know about sedimentology by actual observation was nonetheless untrue when we weren't looking.It's not just chalk. I gave that as a particular example, but it's all the sediment. You need to make out a case that when we weren't looking the deposition of calcareous ooze went three thousand times faster than the maximum observed rate and the deposition of siliceous ooze and the deposition of pelagic clay and the deposition of the micrometorites found in pelagic clay and and and and and.Otherwise, the scientific method tells us that we must believe that what we observe to be a law is in fact a law.

Actually, all of them. Every single scientific theory stands "just because no one disproved it". That is the best thing that one can say about a scientific theory.Mindspawn is not asking us to believe a scientific theory because no-one has disproved it. If he did, he'd have the scientific method on his side. What he is actually asking us to do is to reject a hypothesis because we can't conclusively prove that there's no counterexample. This is the complete opposite of the scientific method.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

A couple of minutes with Google says you're wrong.

Well, it is certainly true that no evolutionist has ever thought through the implications of there being no mountains in the Carboniferous Period.

I'm not sure if this is true, we'd have to look stuff up. However, I am sure that that wasn't your point. What you were talking about was the amount of water necessary for a global flood. Now, the existence of even one substantial mountain in the Carboniferous undermines your point.And geologists tell me that in their youth the Appalachians must have been at least 5km high. Now even if they were the only mountain range in the world back then (which they weren't) and the rest of the Earth was as flat as a pancake, that would still leave you with a lot of water to account for.

I did some research on this lately. What I found, in summary, is that after all these excitable reports of things like pollen and fern spores even as far back as the Cambrian, scientists looked at the reagents used to prepare rock samples for microscopic examination and found that they were contaminated with microscopic organic material such as ... yeah, you guessed it, pollen and spores.This explains the anomalous observations; it also, you will note, explains the nature of the anomalous observations: they were always of microscopic stuff that could get into the factory where the reagent is produced and find its way into a bottle, and never something like a human skull, which couldn't. Or, for that matter, an entire angiosperm plant, rather than just the pollen of one. Here's a paper: Now, if the reagents are contaminated with microscopic material such as pollen, which they are, then we would expect palynologists to find pollen in the wrong places, and they do. But we wouldn't expect anyone to find angiosperm plants in the wrong places, and they don't.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

You say, and I quote: "you should read up on the landscape of the carboniferous. FLAT. Not mountainous like today'.Now, we have read up on the landscape of the Carboniferous. It turns out that according to geologists, there was this great big Appalachian orogeny that made big mountains all over the place. We did indeed "read up on the landscape of the carboniferous". And you were completely wrong.So now you move the goalposts. You don't like what geologists found, so now you wish to say: "Have you got any proof that the Appalachians or any other mountain range was more than just a series of hills"?You told us to read up on the landscape of the Carboniferous, and we did. It was not flat, it had mountains.This is what geologists tell us. And you yourself were quite happy to believe every word they say so long as you could believe that they were saying that there were no mountains in the Carboniferous. Now that I say otherwise, you want a standard of proof more rigorous than you found sufficient to believe in your own dumb daydreams.

Well, think about this. Let's take the Appalachians as an example.In the first place, they have obviously been worn down by erosion. Anything that was on the top of them when they were uplifted won't be there any more.In the second place, the standard geological explanation of them is that they were low-lying prior to their uplift. That's what uplift means. The constituent sedimentary rocks of the Appalachians used to be at the bottom of the sea or something, then they were uplifted. They became high ground.In the third place, fossils aren't deposited on high ground. How would that even work? The fossils we have are 99.9% stuff that was deposited in the sea, in a lake, in a subsiding sedimentary basin --- in a place where sediment is deposited. Sediment isn't deposited on the tops of mountains. The tops of mountains are where erosion takes place. You can't do this, it really doesn't work. If "flood geologists" are right, then real geologists are a bunch of fools motivated by ideology and prejudice --- you can't rely on them to tell you anything. They tell you that there were marine transgressions in the Carboniferous? Yeah, but they also tell you that these transgressions never covered the whole of the Earth, that there has never been a global flood, that the Earth is about a million times older than YECs think it is, and that "flood geology" is the most ridiculous bunch of lies they've ever heard. If "flood geology" is right, then you need to remake the whole of geology from the bottom up, you can't rely on real geologists to tell you when and where there were marine transgressions, because they are wrong and wouldn't know a marine transgression if it punched them in the face while shouting: "I'M A MARINE TRANSGRESSION, BITCHES!" Your whole case has to be that you can't rely on geologists to tell you anything, we have to go right back to the rocks and start again. I'm sure someone else is going to turn up and explain to you why this is nonsense, so I'm not going to lecture you on it.What I will point out is that you're talking about things you've never studied. You are talking about these things fluently and authoritatively, only when I read you saying: "The link does not show numerous alleles, this is showing numerous nucleotides at a single locus" then I know that you have no idea what you're talking about. You couldn't have written that sentence if you'd read the first couple of chapters of any textbook on genetics.And you must know that you haven't actually studied genetics. But you still presume to lecture us on this subject with the same calm assurance with which you patronized Percy by telling him that if only he studied the subject more carefully he'd know that the landscape of the Carboniferous Period had no mountains.Now, this issue goes beyond a mere debate about who's right and who's wrong. This is an ethical issue. You are standing up in what is, after all, a public forum, that anyone with internet access can read, and you are blandly assuring everyone that this and that is true about subjects that you know you have never studied. You lecture everyone on the geography of the Carboniferous, which you have never studied, and now you're telling us about genetics when you plainly have never studied it even so far as to know the meaning of the word "allele". And you know that you have never studied these topics with any seriousness. But in public, you behave as though you know all about them --- and you actually chastise Percy for not having studied enough to agree with the stuff that you've made up in your head!As I say, this is an ethical issue. We can all be wrong about stuff, that happens to the best of us. But you are setting yourself up in public as an authority on areas of science that you know perfectly well you've never really studied.I should add that I've only gone on about this at such length because I'm sure that at heart you're a nice guy who intends to do the right thing. But the fact is that in this case you haven't done the right thing. You're lecturing people, in public, on subjects that you haven't spared five minutes to understand. This is a bad thing to do.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I had to go back and read through all your posts to find out why you wrote that. It's because the sons of God descended from heaven to fuck human women, yes? Thus enlarging our gene pool, right?But this doesn't happen any more, apparently. The Bible just stops mentioning them. Did God, so to speak, ground his sons at some point, and say: "OK, no more descending from heaven, you just do it to chase after human ass. I'm taking away the keys of your Heavenmobile"? One has to wonder.